Slaughterhouse-Five

by Kurt Vonnegut

book data

83,915 ratings, 4.05 average rating, 3,322 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		39%
4		35%
3		18%
2		4%
1		2%

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published

January 12th 1999 (first published 1969) by Dial Press Trade Paperback

binding

Paperback, 275 pages

characters

Billy Pilgrim

literary awards

Nebula Best Novel nominee (1969), Hugo Best Novel nominee (1970), National Book Award Fiction Finalist (1970), 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006/2008), TIME Magazine - ALL-TIME 100 Novels

isbn

0385333846 (isbn13: 9780385333849)

description

In its publication year, Slaughterhouse-Five was nominated for a best-novel Nebula Award and for a best-novel Hugo Award, 1970. It lost both to The ...more

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02/15/08

Kirstie rated it:

Read in February, 2008

recommends it for: people dealing with trauma

I read this book first in 1999 when my grandfather passed away. It was a bit of a coincidence as his funeral occurred between a Primate Anatomy exam and a paper for my Experimental Fiction class on Slaughterhouse Five. I was frantically trying to remember the names of all kinds of bones when I picked this up in the other hand and tried to wrap my head around it.

Basically, Vonnegut has written the only Tralfamadorian novel I can think of. These beings, most undoubtedly inspir...more I read this book first in 1999 when my grandfather passed away. It was a bit of a coincidence as his funeral occurred between a Primate Anatomy exam and a paper for my Experimental Fiction class on Slaughterhouse Five. I was frantically trying to remember the names of all kinds of bones when I picked this up in the other hand and tried to wrap my head around it.

Basically, Vonnegut has written the only Tralfamadorian novel I can think of. These beings, most undoubtedly inspired in Billy Pilgrim's head by the scattered science fiction plots of Kilgore Trout, experience time as a continuum that is constantly occurring...and when they look at time, even though in their version of history, the world is in a constant state of being destroyed for example, they choose to see the things that make them happy...the good moments.

What Billy learns from these creatures is that each traumatic event that has happened in his life fits very precisely into a state of meticulous nature. It has always happened and always will happen and so it goes (on and on and on). What Billy Pilgrim truly experiences over and over in his life is Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. He exists throughout his memories traveling back and forth with the knowledge of what will happen and how precise it all is. Dresden is bombed in every moment and his friend Derby is put in front of a firing squad. At every second, he is the only survivor of a plane wreck, he is getting married, and he is fighting a Children's Crusade. It's the only way he can look at the despair that has happened and make sense of it.

When my grandfather died and I read this, I felt as if it was just what I needed because I could escape back into time and remember the good memories of my grandfather...if they existed (even if in some fourth dimension) then he was just as dead as he was alive and eating peanut butter chocolate ice cream. At the same time my grandfather had a heart attack, I was watching him play cards with my grandma at the kitchen table. But which one to think of? Well, that was easy. Death can't be prevented and so it goes but you can always try to change which moment you live in. It's a little bit different than a memory and if you go far into it, you'll end up like Billy Pilgrim, which is to say, you will go insane because the rest of the world sees time as linear and counts seconds and minutes and hours.

Once and awhile, it doesn't hurt. I re-read this again on the plane rides home and back before and after my grandmother's funeral on Monday and last night. My grandma was a strong and intelligent woman and she always read everything she saw. My recent memories of my grandmother were of her at the holidays. She always had her mind but her physical condition had deteriorated and she was dependent on oxygen. It made me sad to think of her like this a bit.

It's really hard for me to think that my grandma is no more but then I tell myself...well, it's silly for me to keep crying on and on about this. My grandma is right now reading at 4am in her living room chair and I am a child creeping down the stairs hoping she's still up. She is telling me that one day I'll come around and like green onions. She is reminding me to keep my feet off of the davenport and about being "tickled" by something. She lives in a jungle of houseplants and watches musicals all of the time, always pointing out when some distant relative of mine appears briefly in The Greatest Show on Earth. My grandma can't be dead and be doing all of those things, can she? It doesn't make sense. She will always be alive in some moments just like I will always be seven and nine and twenty eight and perhaps past thirty and forty. So, she'll always be here.

I just wish I could dream about her.
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03/11/08

Martine rated it:

bookshelves: historical-fiction, modern-fiction, north-american, postmodern, science-fiction

Read in March, 2008

I have to admit to being somewhat baffled by the acclaim Slaughterhouse-5 has received over the years. Sure, the story is interesting, and it has a fascinating and mostly successful blend of tragedy and comic relief. And yes, I guess the fractured structure and time-travelling element must have been quite novel and original back in the day. But that doesn't excuse the book's flaws, of which there are rather a lot in my (seemingly unconventional) opinion. Take, for instance, Vonnegut's endless re...more I have to admit to being somewhat baffled by the acclaim Slaughterhouse-5 has received over the years. Sure, the story is interesting, and it has a fascinating and mostly successful blend of tragedy and comic relief. And yes, I guess the fractured structure and time-travelling element must have been quite novel and original back in the day. But that doesn't excuse the book's flaws, of which there are rather a lot in my (seemingly unconventional) opinion. Take, for instance, Vonnegut's endless repetition of the phrase 'So it goes.' Wikipedia informs me it crops up 106 times in the book. It felt like 300 times to me. About forty pages into the book, I was so fed up with the words 'So it goes' that I felt like hurling the book across the room, something I have not done since trying to read up on French semiotics back in the nineties. I got used to them eventually, but I never grew to like them. God, no.

I found some other nits to pick, too. Some of them were small and trivial, such as -- wait for it -- the hyphen in the book's title. Seriously, what is that hyphen doing there? There's no need for a hyphen there. Couldn't someone have removed it, like, 437 editions ago? And while I'm at it, couldn't some discerning editor have done something about the monotonous quality of Vonnegut's prose -- about the interminable repetition of short subject-verb-object sentences? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all authors should use Henry James- or Claire Messud-length sentences. I'm actually rather fond of minimalism, both in visual art and in writing. But Vonnegut's prose is so sparse and simplistic it's monotonous rather than minimalist, to the point where I frequently found myself wishing for a few longer sentences every now and then, or for an actual in-depth description of something. I hardly ever got them. As a result, there were times when I felt like I was reading a bare-bones outline of a story rather than the story itself. True, it was an interesting outline, but still, I think the story could have been told in more effective way. A less annoying way, too.

As for the plot, I liked it. I liked the little vignettes Vonnegut came up with and the colourful characters he created (the British officers being my particular favourites). I liked the fact that you're never quite sure whether Billy is suffering from dementia, brain damage or some kind of delayed post-traumatic stress disorder or whether there is some actual time-travelling going on. I even liked the jarring switches in perspective, although I think they could have been handled slightly more subtly. And I liked the book's anti-war message, although it seemed to be curiously weak and defeatist. In short, I liked the book, but it took some doing. I hope I'll be less annoyed by the two other Vonnegut books I have sitting on my shelves, Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle.
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02/06/08

Amelia rated it:

bookshelves: classics, sci-fi

Read in February, 2008

I suspect that I am one of very few people who had never read this book. This being confirmed by some of my goodreads "friends", I had my task before me.

I have to say that over all I enjoyed it very much. It took me a few chapters to get used to his repetitive nature, and in the end grew to appreciate it. His descriptions, particularly of characters, stand out to me.

"It was a random, bristly beard, and some of the bristles were white, even though Billy...more

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11/18/07

Shannon rated it:

bookshelves: 2008, history, not-worth-it, sci-fi, time-travel

Read in January, 2008

Contains spoilers
Slaughterhouse-Five is about a man called Billy Pilgrim who time-travels frequently. He was in the Second World War and, captured, was sent to Dresden to work in a malt syrup factory before the city was bombed. He studied optometry and had a nervous breakdown. He married the daughter of a rich optometrist, and became rich as well. He was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who put him in a zoo with a young porn actress, Montana Wildhack, whom they also abducted. He ...more Contains spoilers
Slaughterhouse-Five is about a man called Billy Pilgrim who time-travels frequently. He was in the Second World War and, captured, was sent to Dresden to work in a malt syrup factory before the city was bombed. He studied optometry and had a nervous breakdown. He married the daughter of a rich optometrist, and became rich as well. He was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who put him in a zoo with a young porn actress, Montana Wildhack, whom they also abducted. He had a daughter called Barbara and a son called Robert. He was in a plane crash that killed everyone except him and the co-pilot. Rushing to the hospital in frantic worry, his wife Valencia dies in a car accident. He gets to meet his favourite author, an unsuccessful sci-fi writer called Kilgore Trout. "Slaughterhouse-Five" is the name of the building where the American POWs lived in in Dresden.

Because the narration jumps around as frequently as Billy does, you learn everything early on and then simply revisit it all. The fractured narrative is worse than watching ads in a commercial break, or those horrible pop songs where the scenes and costumes change every two seconds - it gives you a headache. It's extremely boring, and hollow, and unsatisfying.

I'm not a huge sci-fi fan, as you know. But I do like time-travel stories. Billy is nothing like Henry from The Time Traveler's Wife. For a start, not even a second seems to pass in "real" time while he is travelling - no one ever notices. It seems less like time-travelling than like reliving the past, present and future of your life, all at once, because it's his consciousness that does the travelling. What isn't clear, at all, is which is the real Billy? He moves so much, you have to wonder how he doesn't become completely dislodged from his own corporeal self and go mad.

The time-travelling predates the abduction-by-aliens, but the aliens themselves see the past, present and future simultaneously, and teach Billy their philosophy of not really caring about anything, since nothing can be changed etc. etc. Fatalism.

I think I hated this book, but not quite. Hate is a strong emotion and I don't think it brought that out in me. It wasn't even frustrating, nor even particularly confusing, though the repetition of the Tralfamadorian expression "so it goes" was so irritating I saw red a few times. The bits about the 100 American POWs being welcomed by the British POWs in a German prison camp was delightful, though boldly stereotyped, and I loved the excerpts from the work on American soldiers and prisoners-of-war by the American-turned-Nazi, forget his name, something Campbell. A lot of it - and it's a small, short book - could easily be skipped. The temptation was very strong.

In short, it's a very "postmodern" story, and like all things postmodern, it's impractical, disjointed, a bit wanky, tries too hard, is extremely out-dated and, at the end of the day, rather useless. Vonnegut is also very heavy-handed and bangs you on the head with his messages. It doesn't really inspire me to read more of Vonnegut's work. I guess he's a love-him-or-hate-him kind of story-teller.(less)

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08/20/07

Steve rated it:

Soon after Vonnegut died quite a few stories were circulated about his real-life experiences as a POW in Dresden during WWII. Billy, the book’s main character, survived the firebombing just as Vonnegut did. Both recognized the good fortune of their underground prison vantage point when the flames incinerated the city above, but both had plenty to cope with, too. In telling Billy’s story, Vonnegut connects several themes. Not surprisingly, “war is hell” is one of them. Some of the ot...more

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01/20/08

Danielle rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in March, 2008

So it goes.
I was a huge Vonnegut fan in high school, and had been looking forward to reading his magnum opus. However, I was disappointed.
I think the message of this book is valuable, and it would have lost some of it's power being told in any other way. However, I came away with a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like if I were listening to a rap song full of offensive language and references. Maybe the message of the song is meaningful, and valuable, but because of the presentation, ...more So it goes.
I was a huge Vonnegut fan in high school, and had been looking forward to reading his magnum opus. However, I was disappointed.
I think the message of this book is valuable, and it would have lost some of it's power being told in any other way. However, I came away with a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like if I were listening to a rap song full of offensive language and references. Maybe the message of the song is meaningful, and valuable, but because of the presentation, I just can't appreciate what it's trying to say. I was so frequently offended by the content of this book, mainly the sex, some of the language, and the callousness toward human suffering, that trying to appreciate the larger picture was difficult for me.
Especially compared to other Vonnegut books, I felt like this was more the drunk ramblings of a dirty old man.
On the upside, though, some of that callousness is what makes the whole anti-war theme so poignant. I didn't enjoy the Holocaust museum, but it was a valuable experience. I definitely didn't enjoy this book, but in the future, I'll probably be more acutely aware of (and more quick to condemn) the kind of insensitive attitude toward life that permeated this book.
I'm not sure exactly what Vonnegut's intentions were, but for me, I saw a parallel between Billy Pilgrim's attempt to educate the world about the true nature of time, as imparted to him by the Tralfamadorians, and Vonnegut's attempt to convince the world of the true horrors of the Dresden fire bombing. At first, Billy couldn't talk about it at all, because the time wasn't ripe. Billy's hospital roommate alludes to the same being the case with Dresden when he says initially the US didn't even acknowledge the destruction of Dresden because of bleeding hearts who wouldn't understand it was necessary. By the time the truth came out, people didn't want to believe it. I think Billy's final scene of life is hopeful. Just as he eventually amasses devoted followers of his theory, Vonnegut is hopeful that eventually all the world will realize the utter futility of war, and it's the roommate warhawk general that will sound like the crackpot, rather than Billy Pilgrim.
I found Vonnegut's asides distracting, and thought the story would have been better off without the first-person narration. Also, the references to other Vonnegut characters (Elliot Rosewater, Kilgore Trout, etc.) threw me because I haven't read his other books recently enough to tell whether the stories actually fit together or not, so that was a little weird.
Anyway, if it weren't for the offensive material previously mentioned, I would probably read this book again in an attempt to better appreciate it. As it is, I'll leave it with the moral that war is pointless, and so it goes.(less)

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11/21/07

Debby rated it:

bookshelves: favorites

"I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone." I do not feel so all alone.

"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time...He has seen birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all events in between."

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." Ah yes, the building blocks of life that make sense to Americans.

"...more

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04/05/09

Daniel rated it:

bookshelves: re-read

Read in April, 2009

Breaking with my usual habit of giving what I like to think are clear, well-reasoned explanations of why I did or didn't like a particular book, I'm giving "Slaughterhouse-Five" five stars with little elaboration. I'll simply say that this was my first time revisiting the book since first reading it in high school, and part of the reason for my high rating is that it held up incredibly well -- something I can say of few books I loved as a teenager.

Kurt Vonnegut's writing si...more Breaking with my usual habit of giving what I like to think are clear, well-reasoned explanations of why I did or didn't like a particular book, I'm giving "Slaughterhouse-Five" five stars with little elaboration. I'll simply say that this was my first time revisiting the book since first reading it in high school, and part of the reason for my high rating is that it held up incredibly well -- something I can say of few books I loved as a teenager.

Kurt Vonnegut's writing simply touches my reptilian brain stem in a way few authors' books do. I don't know that I love "Slaughterhouse-Five" as much as I do "Breakfast of Champions" -- one's favorite Vonnegut book is often the one he read first, and for me that was "Breakfast" -- but it's still a great book.

In "Slaughterhouse-Five," Vonnegut makes mention that one of his recurring characters, science-fiction author Kilgore Trout, has great ideas but is a terrible writer. Fortunately for his readers, Vonnegut both had great ideas and was a wonderful writer. His exploration of the life of a character who spends his entire existence bouncing among various highlights of his life -- becoming, in Vonnegut's parlance, unstuck in time -- is consistently creative and insightful. One may be tempted to criticize Vonnegut for making Billy Pilgrim an overly passive character, for never having him take control of his life or fight back, but such passivity makes complete sense for someone who realizes he has no free will -- that the story of his life, and death, has already been written and nothing he does will alter it.

Despite its dark subject matter, "Slaughterhouse-Five" is occasionally quite funny, and not just sardonically so. Having forgotten the scene from my first reading of "Slaughterhouse-Five," I laughed out loud at Kilgore Trout convincing a less-than-brilliant woman at a party that all of his novels are completely true -- that it would be a violation of the law for him to write a story that was untrue.

It turns out I said more about "Slaughterhouse-Five" than I intended to. Be glad, though, that I managed to write this whole review without saying "so it goes." Well, until now. So it goes.(less)

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12/06/08

Tara rated it:

Read in March, 2009

I pretty much thought this book was brilliant--I've read it twice now and I shall read it again. It is difficult to write about, and read about, a subject of horror. Because, c'mon, that's what it is. If the earth in Dresden becomes a veritable tomb for stinking, rotting corpses, and the few survivors have to spray fire into the holes to incinerate the rot because it is physically impossible to smell and touch the rot without hacking all your guts out...well, that's horrific. Yet Vonnegut mangag...more

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08/19/08

Benjamin rated it:

At some point, every Vonnegut novel that I've read feels like it was written by a very intelligent twelve-year-old. The difference between his novels that I love and the ones that I find tedious is how much that child stays buried. This is the most successful. I really like this novel, and there are loads of phrases and scenes that are permanently burned into my mind. "What are you supposed to be?" It, like all of Vonnegut, is not for everyone. But I like it.

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08/10/08

Destinee rated it:

(review of isbn 0844663662)

bookshelves: sci-fi

Read in September, 2008

I picked this up because I was looking at this website that had pictures of literary tattoos and an extraordinary number of people had "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" tattoos. I was like, "What is so great about this quote that all these people had it permanently inked on their bodies?" Turns out, the quote is kind of a non-sequitur. I mean, I'm sure you can figure out a way in which it's deeply integral to the book's themes or whatever, but in terms of the narrat...more

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07/29/08

Phill rated it:

(review of isbn 0844663662)

bookshelves: classic, cult, literary

I was not aware of Kurt Vonnegut when he passed away last year. I hadn’t read a single book of his, and that situation remained until a few weeks ago when, after watching a documentary on another fallen hero, Hunter S. Thompson, I decided to buy some of the books I had intended to a long time ago and never did. So in went Catch-22, South of No North, The Cheese Monkeys, and Slaughterhouse-Five. And out I walked looking like a ‘cult classic’ wannabe late to the party.

Slaughterhous...more I was not aware of Kurt Vonnegut when he passed away last year. I hadn’t read a single book of his, and that situation remained until a few weeks ago when, after watching a documentary on another fallen hero, Hunter S. Thompson, I decided to buy some of the books I had intended to a long time ago and never did. So in went Catch-22, South of No North, The Cheese Monkeys, and Slaughterhouse-Five. And out I walked looking like a ‘cult classic’ wannabe late to the party.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the first of the four that I’ve read and I find that kind of sad, because now the others have such a high bar to flip towards that surely they’ll trip and stumble. But we’ll wait and see. In any case I, like just about every other person on the planet that has read Vonnegut it seems, found it wonderful. It’s told from the perspective of a man named Billy Pilgrim, who becomes ‘unstuck in time’ following an aeroplane crash in his late life. This leads to a narrative that jumps back and forth throughout a few major settings of his life: his brief experience as a chaplain’s aide in World War II, as a prisoner of war in a Dresden slaughterhouse (number five, giving its title to the book) during the famous firebombing, postwar with his fat, millionaire heiress wife, and as an elder man who spreads the word of his fatalist philosophy, developed as a result of his being kidnapped by an alien race.

As you may have guessed by that last item, there are a couple of science-fiction elements in the book, but not enough that it falls into the dreaded void that might have seen a lot of people ignore it out of their pig-minded refusal to read genre fiction. The literary mechanism of time travel can’t really be called science-fiction, as it there is no grand machine, and it is never known if it occurs only in Billy Pilgrim’s mind. The alien race that picks up Billy and helps him understand his time shifting is unavoidably going to be thought of as sci-fi, but they could just as easily have been a group of monks. So there’s really no reason to be a literature snob, there’s ideas like this in all genre fiction. <backs down off soapbox>

A major theme in the book is the concept of time and space as related to death. The aliens (Tralfamadorians) that help Billy (and display him in a zoo with a porno star, incidentally) can see in the fourth dimension, time, and therefore can visit any point of their life at any time. As a result of their unique sight, they believe that the body exists forever; when a body dies, it merely stops existing in that time and place, but continues to exist in other times and places where it was still alive. This fatalist worldview is something that Billy preaches later in life, which ends up amassing him a public profile that leads to his death at the hands of a revenge-loving fellow slaughterhouse refugee. The famous quote of ’so it goes’ is the standard response from the Tralfamadorians (and also the narrator) whenever death occurs.

Slaughterhouse-five has been called an anti-war book (in fact, the back cover claims it to be the most famous anti-war book every made, which I find hard to believe), but I think it is more of a comment on the human condition; the way that we operate in ways so perpendicular to what we know is what we want as a result of our modern environment. That it is mostly set in a warzone doesn’t really mean that it is anti-war, I think Vonnegut has used war as an extreme example of the silliness of humankind’s value system. Without sounding like a hippy, I’d recommend it to anyone who thinks that work is life, or that politics is life, or that religion is life. I found it brilliant as a piece of literature, brilliant as a story, and brilliant as a different view on the problem of modern life.(less)

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09/17/07

Darga rated it:

bookshelves: favorites

Read in August, 2007

i've been meaning to read some vonnegut for years and years. i finally picked this up, and two days later he died. hearing about the strangeness of time and how people never really die from a man who had just died made this book all the more powerful for me.

like all my favorite books, there are random tangents and commentary on all sorts of things. one of my favorite parts of the book is one character's critique of the bible:

"the gospels actually taught this: befor...more

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05/30/07

Kelly rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in May, 2003

recommends it for: everyone

This was my first, and to date, only Vonnegut experience. I read this in my junior year of high school, tacked onto the end of the year. Mostly as an indulgence to my english teacher who was obsessed with Vonnegut and squeezing it in at the end of the year to have people to fanboy and geek out with after they'd read it. Then I read it and figured out why he was so obsessed. I have to say, this book yanked me firmly into modern literature. (At the time I was deep into my love for 18th and 19th ce...more

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06/03/09

Michael rated it:

Read in June, 2009

Ben Roberts gave me this book for my sixteenth birthday. I asked him what it was about and he said it was about World War Two and the bombing of Dresden and an American POW who is abducted by UFO's. But then he added that it was only kind of about those things, about those things but not really, hard to explain. Then he walked off. Anyway, I was definitely interested in WW2 at the time--and sadly, many, many other wars, some even nonfictional--and so that night at 16 when I flipped open the firs...more Ben Roberts gave me this book for my sixteenth birthday. I asked him what it was about and he said it was about World War Two and the bombing of Dresden and an American POW who is abducted by UFO's. But then he added that it was only kind of about those things, about those things but not really, hard to explain. Then he walked off. Anyway, I was definitely interested in WW2 at the time--and sadly, many, many other wars, some even nonfictional--and so that night at 16 when I flipped open the first page of that beat-up second-hand paper-back that I'm sure Ben had used to insulate something at one point, I only found a man with a bad attitude rambling about some things and he didn't seem to have a very heroic view of things. I was fanatic about heroics at the time, because I went to private school and didn't understand what that meant. Most of the other kids had no problem with it, because they understood that the first rule of private school, especially a religious one, is to say you believe in things and act as though you believe in things and harshly ridicule those who transgress the things you believe, when in fact you believe in absolutely nothing and take your parents credit card out with you on the weekends. My parents never gave me their credit card and I had a hard time fitting in because I did believe in things, like heroism, and it was years after I graduated before I realized why kids used to stare at me blankly when I talked about heroics and fighting against evil for good. Poor me, I wasn't rich, wasn't good at football, got bored too easily with classes and got kicked out of the drama department for cutting up with the more popular actors than myself: heroics was all I had. So, when I realized that no one was going to get killed (at least not the way I wanted them to, heroically) and that there were no space ships laden with other-worldly warriors coming to attack us, I put it down. Probably for Tolkien. Or a Star Wars novel. I sold Ben's second-hand copy that he gave me for my birthday years ago. Sorry Ben.

So, fourteen years and a few days later I opened it back up again. Things had changed. It was a much better book. I was surprised. And very pleased. I know this is one of those books that you're supposed to read in high school, but I didn't because I hated reading because I was afraid I would turn into the kids I went to school with--most of whom would never read a book again after graduating and some who would destroy the parts of their brains that the read was stored in through drug use and some that would die. So it goes. But here today, looking back, I'm glad I didn't read it. I'm glad I waited till now. But enough about my reading.

I want to venture to say that this may be one of the tightest books--thematically, elementally, rhetorically--I have ever read. It is poetry in the highest order disguised under Vonnegut's gruff, bar-stool vernacular. It's easy enough, if not dangerous, for kids, who can pick up on the book's (and Vonnegut's) bad attitude pretty quickly. But dangerous because the average 17 year old can't possibly understand what this is about, though he could pick up on the basic angst and feel as though he got it. Also, the average high schooler probably wouldn't read this unless he or she was getting class credit. To those who did read this for their own good, I'd highly recommend re-reading if you haven't already. I think you'll find a lot that you missed the first time around.

One of the novel's particular strengths is it's voice. It would not be difficult to imagine Vonnegut reciting this story to someone sitting next to him in a bar, the prose is so familiar, so self-aware and irreverent. But thematically, it's iconoclasm is another of the novel's strengths. Vonnegut is not vindictive in his assaults on how Americans saw and thought of America and other Americans post-war. Like Ben said, it's about those things but not really. It's profound and funny and sad at points, but not really. That's not why you laugh. The novel's broken and a-chronological order drive home its elements more fully, and the small details he uses to link everything together add layer upon layer.

The greatest strength of the novel, I feel, however, is that Vonnegut doesn't waste a word. Everything is there than needs to be without any excess--and tied together so perfectly. It's breathtaking really, like a matador that so enchants a bull that he can kiss it on the forehead. I cannot praise it enough.(less)

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04/09/09

Joel Spring rated it:

Read in April, 2009

I'm on the homestretch with this one. Call it a reread if you would like. Originally, I listened to this on audio book a few years back with Ethan Hawk as narrator, and to be brutally honest to poor Ethan: his reading really detracted from the harsh beauty of this novel.

I didn't know much about Vonnegut before listening to it and felt that it was a good idea to read it though without the vocal distraction. Boy, am I glad I did. The time-traveling Tralfamadorians world view is so dis...more

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10/28/08

Jared Jacobs rated it:

Slaughter House Five is written by Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut was born November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He died April 11, 2007 in New York. He has written numerous novels, such as the Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions. The book Slaughter House Five is about a man named Billy Pilgrim, who is trying to write a book about his war experience in Dresden. Throughout the story Billy travels through time to the war, his ad...more

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10/27/08

Ben rated it:

The novel Slaughter-House Five is written by Kurt Vonnegut and was published in 1969. Vonnegut was born in 1922 and died in 2007. He was the author of eighteen books and many short stories and essays. Some of his more popular books are Breakfast of the Champions and Cat’s Cradle. Slaughter-House Five is about a man named Billy Pilgrim who has become “unstuck in time.” As a result, the novel jumps around from one time period to another in his life. These stretches of time include his ...more

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10/27/08

Alan W rated it:

Read in October, 2008

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut is a story about World War 2. Kurt Vonnegut writes predominantly science fiction books. These include the novels Bluebeard, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, Deadeye Dick, and Galapagos. The novel is about a World War 2 veteran that has difficulty staying in the same time frame. He jumps back and forth between his life during the war, his life with children, and his life on a planet called Tramalfador. He talks about how hard it was in the army and explain...more Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut is a story about World War 2. Kurt Vonnegut writes predominantly science fiction books. These include the novels Bluebeard, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, Deadeye Dick, and Galapagos. The novel is about a World War 2 veteran that has difficulty staying in the same time frame. He jumps back and forth between his life during the war, his life with children, and his life on a planet called Tramalfador. He talks about how hard it was in the army and explains why he always jumps back and forth between times. This is how he tells the story of his life in the army.
In the novel, the main character suffers from many diseases. He hallucinated that he was brought to the planet Tramalfador and held on display in their idea of a zoo. These parts in the book were interesting because as a reader, I never expected it to happen. The characterization of Billy Pilgrim also made the story very interesting. It showed him as an extremely intelligent person but with almost no common sense and people skills. He was able to graduate top of his class in optometry school, but he failed as a soldier to communicate with his army buddies. Some of the parts seemed very repetitive. This was one of the downsides to the novel. Parts of the novel, I could race through but other parts were a drag and it took me awhile to get through them.
Some weaknesses in the novel include its lack of explanation. In the beginning of the novel, it just throws you in for a ride as the reader. It goes into the book with him talking about the war with no background information whatsoever about what side he was on and why was it significant? It would have helped me if the author had told me that Billy was from the American side right off the bat. Also, if the author had stayed at each scene for a longer period of time and explained in more detail, I would have comprehended the book better. The author jumps too quickly from scene to scene. It’s hard to understand where he is going to go next.
Despite its confusing and slow parts, this novel is an entertaining one to read. People that enjoy novels merely for entertainment will enjoy this book.
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10/27/08

Nick N rated it:

(review of isbn 0844663662)

Read in October, 2008

Slaughterhouse-Five is a war novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut wrote other classic titles like Jailbird, Bluebeard, Breakfast of Champions, and Slapstick.Slaughterhouse-Five is a story of an optometrist, soldier, zoo animal, father, and husband, named Billy Pilgrim. Billy is abducted by aliens, and becomes unstuck in time. He travels at random to different moments in his life. The novel follows Billy’s life from his young adult hood as a soldier, to his death, however in Billy’s...more

Slaughterhouse-Five is a war novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut wrote other classic titles like Jailbird, Bluebeard, Breakfast of Champions, and Slapstick.Slaughterhouse-Five is a story of an optometrist, soldier, zoo animal, father, and husband, named Billy Pilgrim. Billy is abducted by aliens, and becomes unstuck in time. He travels at random to different moments in his life. The novel follows Billy’s life from his young adult hood as a soldier, to his death, however in Billy’s life there is no past, present, or future, only different moments.
Vonnegut artistically plays with the reader’s view of reality and time throughout the novel. Time is almost completely irrelevant in regards to the setting. Mainly the setting focuses on general time spans, and places rather than specific times. Reality is also shown to be subjective; what is real and tangible to Billy, is completely imaginary to someone else. Several times Billy tries to explain reality to his peers, and every time they simply regard him as insane. Vonnegut also expertly uses repetition through the novel. “So it goes” is constantly repeated, after almost any statement of fact. This once again goes back to the irrelevance of time. It is almost as though Vonnegut is saying that time can’t be stopped; things will happen, and time will continue; so it goes. Billy Pilgrim is for part of his life put on display on an alien planet. This is such a ridiculous and outrageous thing, yet it makes complete sense. When we put animals in a zoo, it is because we don’t understand them, we want to learn about them, or we simply want to look at them. Despite our greatest efforts, there is no way to duplicate a natural life in captivity, and Billy Experiences this first hand. Vonnegut creates an interesting insight into the human psyche through Billy. It seems that what is really being said is that every person is trapped in a zoo, oblivious to the world around him or her.
At times, the story line was extremely confusing. The jumps in time and setting were very abrupt and sudden, often at times with little clues as to the change. This made the book rather choppy and difficult to read. A more flowing, smooth story line, with slow and subtle transitions would have improved the story tremendously. Also, the book opens with the narrator telling a story that is almost completely irrelevant to the main plot. The narrator occasionally mentions himself, and the changes in point of view did not fit into the rhythm of the novel. Character development was weak at times, and left the reader feeling as nothing more than an observer. Apart from Billy, there was little insight into the emotions or thoughts of other characters. The novel would have been more personal and meaningful with more developed characters.
Overall, Slaughterhouse-Five is a worth-wile read for anyone. It is relatively simple as far as the story itself goes, but can be looked at to levels one would never expect. The story is informative, giving an inside look into the life of a WWII soldier. Parts of it are based on factual events, while others are pure fiction. This offers an almost universal appeal to readers of all sorts. In particular, people who enjoy questioning the norm, changing the standard, or looking at things in new and different ways would thoroughly enjoy this book.

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polls

Sometimes the first line of a book just grabs you by the nostrils and drags your fool head into its pages, preventing escape in any way, shape or form. Which of these opening lines has its phalanges most firmly planted in your nasal cavities?

"He— for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it— was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

28 votes, 2.4%

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini

39 votes, 3.4%

"Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women."

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

15 votes, 1.3%

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

10 votes, 0.9%

“'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, 'she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.'”

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

11 votes, 1.0%

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

58 votes, 5.0%

"Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden."

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

8 votes, 0.7%

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

40 votes, 3.5%

“'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'”

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

27 votes, 2.3%

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton

13 votes, 1.1%

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person."

Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

18 votes, 1.6%

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving."

The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

9 votes, 0.8%

"What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?"

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino

0 votes, 0.0%

"It was a pleasure to burn."

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

33 votes, 2.9%

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

The Crow Road by Iain Banks

26 votes, 2.3%

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

57 votes, 5.0%

"Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation."

Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish

9 votes, 0.8%

"For a long time, I went to bed early."

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

10 votes, 0.9%

"The moment one learns English, complications set in."

Chromos by Felipe Alfau

7 votes, 0.6%

"All this happened, more or less."

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

38 votes, 3.3%

"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man."

Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

18 votes, 1.6%

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Neuromancer by William Gibson

30 votes, 2.6%

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

16 votes, 1.4%

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

46 votes, 4.0%

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Murphy by Samuel Beckett

8 votes, 0.7%

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

1984 by George Orwell

34 votes, 3.0%

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

35 votes, 3.0%

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu."

Waiting by Ha Jin

9 votes, 0.8%

"Call me Ishmael."

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

17 votes, 1.5%

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

37 votes, 3.2%

"As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

29 votes, 2.5%

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

30 votes, 2.6%

"Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

37 votes, 3.2%

"Mother died today."

The Stranger by Albert Camus

15 votes, 1.3%

"When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed - 'To Whom It May Concern' - that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson."

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

3 votes, 0.3%

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

40 votes, 3.5%

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

42 votes, 3.7%

"Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing."

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

5 votes, 0.4%

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

30 votes, 2.6%

"Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror."

Herbert West: Reanimator and Other Stories by H.P. Lovecraft

4 votes, 0.3%

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

57 votes, 5.0%

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

12 votes, 1.0%

"All children, except one, grow up."

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

34 votes, 3.0%

"My lady and I are being shut up in a tower for seven years"

Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

4 votes, 0.3%

"'Barabbas came to us by sea', the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy."

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

4 votes, 0.3%

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

17 votes, 1.5%

"Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature."

The Debut by Anita Brookner

0 votes, 0.0%

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim and we sat in the Korova milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening."

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

13 votes, 1.1%

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

28 votes, 2.4%

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

5 votes, 0.4%

Bah! Foolish poll-maker-person! The nostril seizing power of these paltry lines is minimal, at best! Look to the comments section where I shall carefully type out my choice, which you have so imprudently omitted!

35 votes, 3.0%

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"...Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore." More quotes...